“Yes,” I acknowledged distractedly.
He joined me at my desk. “So, how did it go last night?”
“How did what go?”
“Dinner. On your anniversary.”
“Actually, it turned out to be breakfast.”
A sly grin. “You dog, you.”
“No, no. Not like that. I mean…”
“Did you guys check out any…action movies?” He gave me a wink.
Oh man.
How to do this.
I debated about whether or not to tell him what’d just happened at Anthony’s. In the end, perhaps naively, I decided it probably couldn’t hurt anything. “This morning, just now at breakfast, Taci broke up with me.”
“What? The day after your anniversary?”
“She wanted to tell me last night.”
“Oh man, that’s cold.” It looked like he was about to say more, maybe express in his own distinctively colorful way what he thought of a woman who would do that, but he held back-likely because he wasn’t sure if I was bitter, or if maybe I hoped there was some way we could get back together again.
“Apparently,” I said, “it was a choice between me and her career.”
We were both quiet, then he rested a giant paw on my shoulder. “If there’s anything, seriously, anything I can do. Anything you need, let me know. I’ve been there. If you can’t go to your friends when you need ’em, what good are they anyway?”
I barely knew this man and he already considered himself my friend, one close enough to help me when I was really hurting. And in that moment, I realized the feeling was mutual.
“I’ll let you know, Ralph. Thanks.”
He removed his hand. “Maybe we grab a beer tonight, you know? After work? Get your mind off things?”
“Yeah. We’ll see.”
Then he smacked me on the arm in what I took to be a friendly gesture, but one that just might leave a bruise. “Hang in there, bro.”
“Thanks.” I held back from rubbing my arm. “I will.”
He stepped away and I tried to dial in to the case again, but thoughts of Taci just wouldn’t leave me alone. I shut my eyes and concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, promised myself I wasn’t going to cry. That I wouldn’t let it hurt that bad.
And in the end I succeeded.
I took the pain and shock and dismay and buried them as deeply as I could, telling myself that if I stuffed them down far enough, they wouldn’t be able to bother me anymore.
I didn’t want the tape on my hands all day and the bleeding had stopped, so I peeled it off. Tossed it in the trash. Then I went back to work, reviewing what we knew about yesterday’s homicide and the attack on Adele Westin, a woman who was engaged to a man who was willing to do the unthinkable to save her from a madman.
But I hadn’t succeeded in burying my feelings. Not really. When you stuff your pain like that, it can never be called a success.
52
Watching the news last night had been informative to Joshua.
He’d learned more about Hendrich’s murder. The Channel 11 News team was reporting that he’d been, “brutally attacked in a neighborhood known for its aggressive gangs and uncontrolled street violence.”
By the end of the night, the anchorwoman was stating that unnamed sources in the police department were confirming “that law enforcement personnel are looking closely at outsiders who frequent that neighborhood” and “that if you have any information regarding the crimes, you should call the police.”
They gave a hotline number.
As Joshua had thought, Hendrich had been off duty yesterday and no one was sure why he’d been in the train yard in the first place.
The coverage was extensive enough for Joshua to realize that it was all possibly a coincidence after all.
But then how did he get in after you locked the gate? You really think he crawled in under the fence? Or was he in there already?
Yes, there were still questions. A lot of questions. But Joshua had enough information right now to move forward with his plans, right after a visit to the bookshelf to remind himself why he did what he did.
Yesterday he’d thought about the cache he’d found stashed under the basement steps at Timothy Griffin’s house in Fort Atkinson.
Now, he went to look at the cache of his own.
Over the years he’d kept a memento from each victim, all the way back to that first time in the barn when his father gave him one of Kenneth’s teeth.
Coincidently, his collection was in the basement, just like Griffin’s was, but Joshua’s wasn’t in a fake cabinet under the steps, but rather in a small enclosed space behind a bookcase that he’d built when he first moved into the house, before he and Sylvia got married.
Nomads in the Sahara value their freedom and their ability to pitch their tents wherever they please so much that they call houses “graves of the living.”
In the United States we call a nice big home the Great American Dream.
A grave or a dream. Depending on your perspective.
Two truths piercing each other: freedom and security. And you end up with the great irony of American life-living in the grave you have always dreamt of owning.
He slid the bookcase aside and looked at the crate that bristled with bones. He didn’t know how many there were, the statistics of it all were, perhaps surprisingly, one of the things he hadn’t kept track of. It was as if a part of his mind needed to shut that out in order for him to live as normal a life as he could.
But even though he couldn’t remember the name of each victim, just seeing the bones brought the flood of images and memories back again, merging across each other, faces pulled from time in an order that didn’t make sense but that played out in his mind as real, just the same.
They were mostly images of things that’d happened beneath the barn, in that secret place his father took him to. Images of the victims, and the most striking memories of all-of the last day Joshua ever went down there.
He reached into the box and picked up the tractor keys.
Curled his hand around them.
And remembered.
It all.
The day he’d left, the day he’d locked that trapdoor shut, leaving those two people behind him-one, a corpse; the other, soon to become one.
You saw what your father was doing, Joshua. You had to do something. You were finally old enough to take action. Fourteen years old. You had to do it. You know you did.
Yes-running up the steps that day, out of the secret place, into the barn.
You were scared. You had to stop him.
Yes-hearing his father pound up the stairs after him, knowing he was going to make him do things that he didn’t want to do, that he would always hate himself for doing.
Yes-closing the trapdoor and locking it quickly, then standing beside it for a long time, listening to his father bang on it from the bottom and yell. Yell so many things. Bargaining. Threatening. Cursing. And then screaming.
And then the banging started all over again.
His father had handed him the knife before he ran up the stairs, so he knew his father wouldn’t be able to use it to chip away at the thick wood of the trapdoor to escape.
But still, to make sure there was no way for him to get out, Joshua had positioned a long piece of sheet metal over the opening and then drove the tractor over the two ends, positioning the tires, just so, to hold the metal firmly in place. No one else knew about the place beneath the barn. No one else came to their ranch. No one would be moving that tractor.
Now he uncurled his fingers and looked at the keys.
He’d gone out there every day for three weeks, spent long hours sitting in the barn on the seat of the tractor listening to the muted sounds coming from beneath him. The screaming, the pounding. Eventually the crying. His father had a lot of meat down there and it took him a while to die. But eventually, with time, the sounds stopped.